"IT'S A GEG, SO IT IS", said a Belfast woman, Elizabeth McMillan, in northern Israel 14 years ago. "The PLO fire their Katyusha missiles and they're that inaccurate they hit nothing, nothing, just fields. Nobody ever gets hurt, but everybody here gets into the shelters like it was a thousand bomber raid - dead dramatic, end of the world stuff. But the foreigners stay in the open - watching the Katyushas coming in. They can be brilliant like a fireworks display. But they never do any real harm.
Yet, just on occasion, they do real harm, like the one which by the sheerest fluke hit a car in Northern Israel last week. The response to that has been as insane as the so called Peace in Galilee invasion in 1982. And the Israelis have learned nothing from that brutal idiocy, because they have not been obliged to. They live in a world in which no sin is punished and wrongdoing provokes no pangs of conscience.
It is not a question of an eye for an eye; instead, that moral logic is inverted. The eye of the victim is removed; and, because he can do nothing about it, the second eye is then removed; and so it proceeds tooth by tooth and nail by nail until the victim has nothing left to surrender, and yet still the Israelis have not got their way.
Comedy and Tragedy
As it was then, so is it now. Initially, in 1982, the response of the Israelis to the Katyushas appeared comically excessive tens of thousands of men and thousands of armoured vehicles poured across the border into Lebanon. Hundreds of troop carrying helicopters - Pumas Stallions, Chinooks - clattered overhead. I remember musing aloud: The Irish Army has just one helicopter that size; and it's rented.
We haven't even got that Puma anymore; and the Israelis are still in Lebanon. The comical invasion soon ceased to be comical. The Israelis made sea landings, their armoured columns struck north and besieged Beirut. Days after leaving Liz safe and sound in her kibbutz. I was in Beirut, via Cyprus, experiencing at first hand the might of the Israeli air force.
Did they learn nothing from 1982? Nothing? They besieged the city, deployed their Falange allies, used napalm A and B, dropped booby trapped devices in Palestinian refugee camps for children to pick up, and cluster bombed vast areas of west and south Beirut. They killed at least 15,000 people. Such a slaughter of civilians had not been seen outside Asia since the second World War.
"This is it", an American journalist - who happened to be Jewish - said. "It's over for these bastards. Uncle Sam won't continue to pay for this sort of shit. No way. It won't happen. It's over for the Israelis. Over. They're going to have to find new ways.
Brutal Stupidity
Well, they haven't. What they have done, by their brutal stupidity, is make new enemies for themselves. Generally speaking, the Shias and Sunnis and those strange, aloof Druse mountain people had become sick and tired of the arrogance and presumptuousness of the PLO - Palestinian roadblocks in Beirut ultimately had the same effect that roadblocks in Ballsbridge by exiles from Ardoyne would have in Dublin.
The PLO was driven out of Beirut, and the Israelis ended their murderous siege of the city, but they stayed in southern Lebanon. That occupation transformed the initially indifferent Shias, who wanted peace to make money - an ancient levantine preoccupation into a deeply angry and resentful population who can generate martyrs, suicide bombers and deviously skilful guerrillas far more effectively than ever the Palestinians managed. These Lebanese are different. They have a home, a place, a locus. They know who they are. They are worth befriending; they are never worth antagonising.
But if the Israelis are one thing, it is arrogant - I do hope the new Israeli press attache is writing all this down - and, like Bourbons, they seem to remember no lessons; they recall only their own hurts and seem to perceived nobody else's.
The brutality that they have shown to the resurgent economy of Beirut suggests an insensitivity which dims and finally eliminates the small flame of political intelligence which had been warming the peace process.
Collective Punishment
The Israelis have been attacking the economic infrastructure of the Lebanese capital as a collective punishment for events in southern Lebanon. They blame the Lebanese Government for failing to control its citizens in the zone which the Israelis themselves occupy; this is as absurd as the British bombing Poolbeg because of the activities of the New Lodge Road Provos. Even while the creeping barrage of Israeli artillery was shooting a quarter of a million Lebanese from their homes, Katyushas were falling in northern Israel from occupied territories.
The Israelis are not merely the strongest power in the region - they have more armour than the Germans, the French and the British combined; and they cannot impose their will on Lebanese guerrillas. So what precisely is the virtually unarmoured and constitutionally fissiparous government of Beirut to do to succeed where Israel failed?
The Israelis can bomb Beirut until it is the deadly, lightless wasteland they turned it into 14 years ago. They can rearm the Falange and encourage it to slaughter Muslims. They can sit on the high hills surrounding the capital, and fire at will and without reply. But they cannot compel the Lebanese Government to do what it simply can not do. It cannot get a man on the moon; and, while Israel is in occupation of any part of Lebanon, it cannot compel its citizens not to resist.
This is election year in America. The Israeli Government knows that the Zionist lobby there will quash any presidential hopeful who is critical of the insane and wicked Israeli policies in Lebanon. A critical initiative could have come from the European Union; but that august polity is too busy sleuthing after beef to bother about the conquest of a country and the brutal expulsion of its peoples. But those people will be back; and so, alas, will the Katyushas.